Papers by Suman Jana

We’re closing out Unpublished Results Week here with a paper that was submitted to CCS 2015 last May, but doesn’t appear to have made it.

I’ve talked about side channels a little before, but let me repeat why time and cache channels keep coming up and why they’re hard to get rid of: they’re side effects of hardware-design choices that, most of the time, are exactly what you want, if you want your computer to go fast. Think about long versus short division, for instance. It takes less mental effort, and less scratch paper, to manually divide 123456789 by 3 than by 29; the same is true (sort of) for your computer. So if it’s your job to design the CPU, why shouldn’t the integer divide instruction finish quicker in the former case? Especially if you have profiling information that says that most of the time integer divide gets used with small divisors. Memory caches are even more vital—the other day I saw a graph suggesting that it takes order of 17,000 clock cycles for the CPU to come all the way back up to full number crunching speed after a context switch; most of that is probably due to stuff falling out of the cache and having to be pulled back in.

So: side channels are hard to get rid of in hardware because that would involve making design tradeoffs that would hurt performance for the supermajority of code that isn’t crunching sensitive data, and they’re hard to get rid of in software because the hardware, and the compiler, are actively fighting you. (The paper says several times that side-channel-free cryptographic primitives pretty much have to be done in hand-written assembly language, and that getting them right is extremely difficult even by the standards of people who write assembly language by hand.) Wouldn’t it be nice to find a big hammer that would make the problem just … go away? That’s this paper.

A principal design goal for the big hammer in this paper is ease of use. The only thing the application programmer has to do is label protected functions that need to have their side channels eliminated. And it’s not a compiler paper; they haven’t come up with a way to make a compiler do the extremely difficult assembly tuning for you. All the magic happens at runtime. Given all that, it works pretty much the only way it could work: it measures how much the timing varies and then it pads out the fast cases to the same length as the slow cases. It also flushes state from the protected function out of as many CPU caches as possible (memory, TLB, branch target buffer, …) after the function is done, and takes steps (page coloring, CPU and memory pinning, realtime scheduling priority) to ensure that the protected function is not perturbed by what malicious code has done before it starts executing. The authors demonstrate reliability by testing several different crypto primitives that definitely do have side-channel information leaks, and showing that the leak is rendered unavailable in all cases. They also claim the overhead is acceptable (8.5%).

I really like the concept and hope to see more in this vein in the future. I can’t speculate on why this particular paper didn’t get accepted at CCS, but I do feel that the overhead measurements were inadequate: they don’t consider indirect costs of flushing caches and pinning stuff to CPUs all the time. I’d like to see whole-system benchmarking of, say, a shared-hosting HTTPS server. And at least one round of adversarial testing would be nice. It is one thing to demonstrate that your measurements show that the side channels you already knew about have been closed; it is another thing if someone who spends all their time thinking of side-channel attacks cannot find any in your system.